


dark circles aren't punk rock

by kingdavidbowie



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, an attempt at a first date, and then the skrulls attacked again, bruce does unexplainable sciencey things, coulson doesn't really know what's going on, explosive arrows are easier to figure out than passwords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2014-06-18
Packaged: 2018-02-05 04:51:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1805935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingdavidbowie/pseuds/kingdavidbowie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After finding out that Bruce hasn't left his lab in the three weeks since the battle of New York Clint decides to try and get him to go outside (even if he has to carry him to do it). One-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dark circles aren't punk rock

It'd probably been about three weeks since New York when Clint first waltzed in the door (or, well, broke it and came inside, since the lock was proving too difficult and explosive arrows were within closer reach than a password, or so he'd said). In those twenty-ish days Bruce had deteriorated into not much more than dust and skin, deciding he'd rather stay in his lab and try and help the world somehow with science than go outside and wreck more of it. As Clint put it, he had become a vampiric, zombie-type scientist that looked more like Doctor Octopus than Bruce Banner. But it was all a matter of perspective, Bruce figured. Maybe he looked sort of punk with more dark circles under his eyes than usual and the same rumpled purple shirt he'd been rewashing and putting on again for three weeks. (Clint told him that if he wanted to look punk they could go shopping for eyeliner and band t-shirts after Bruce had gotten a decent night's sleep.)

He was sitting in the same chair he'd been working in for who knew how long-- Clint was pretty sure it was molded to the shape of his butt by now, even if it was a pretty sturdy-looking chair-- with his knees to his chest and his arms pulled around his legs, a purple ball of angst and gamma. "Actually," said Bruce, "Maybe we should do that." Since he hadn't really been saying anything for a few minutes it took Clint a second to process it. When he had, there was still confusion clouding his eyes.

"You want to go shopping for band t-shirts and ripped jeans?" He leaned closer across Bruce's messed-up desk all full of papers and syringes and bottles of god-knew-what, trying to get a read on what his teammate was thinking. "I guess I can free a few hours in my busy schedule for a Hot Topic trip," he considered, tilting his head in thought. Bruce couldn't tell if he was being serious or not, but that was fairly normal, he'd figured out, since Clint had started visiting last week. He'd mentally labeled Clint as being in a paradoxical state of both being serious and not being serious at the same time, and maybe neither, too. Of course, he'd never questioned it. That was just Clint, he guessed.

"I meant going outside, but I wouldn't mind-" He stopped himself before he could finish the sentence and say something about Clint in ripped jeans and punk band bracelets around his wrists, because somehow he knew it was going to sound too flirtatious. No, he wasn't flirtatious, so it probably would have just sounded mildly creepy. So his reputation for snappy comments was somewhat tarnished now from him hesitating, but that was better than the alternative. Anyway.

Clint was standing up straight again in front of him, stretching his arms over his head. "That's probably a good idea. It's a good thing you thought of it because I never remembered to ask why you _hadn't gone outside in three weeks_." He rolled his eyes. He had, of course, been trying to drag Bruce outside for the past several days. And then given up because it wasn't working, and he didn't feel like carrying anybody just yet, and maybe, if he laid off, Bruce would get bored. Which he hadn't for a good forty-eight hours, but now it seemed he'd made some progress. That was good. Probably.

"It's nice in here, though," Bruce said, turning in his chair away from the wall constructed of windows that let him look at something other than the inside of some unnamed S.H.I.E.L.D. building so that he could look at more metal and machinery and science instead. Clint pursed his lips slightly at that. "I can order sandwiches and shower and study and I don't even have to leave the lab." He smiled with a corner of his mouth, just a small movement, and he reminded Clint of a puppy. It was the hair. "This might be the best place I've ever stayed."

"You really do need to get out more, you know that?" Clint muttered, moving into Bruce's line of sight again. "You're going to hurt your back or something sleeping in that chair, you old man."

"I doubt I'm that much older than you."

Clint just raised his eyebrows at his teammate's graying hair and leaned back against the desk, saying something under his breath.

"I'm sorry, what was that?" Bruce asked, unfolding his legs finally from his chest and letting his shoes touch down on the floor. "I didn't hear you; probably because I'm too _old_."

His teammate stared at him for a moment with a fairly indecipherable expression before stepping in and picking Bruce up off the chair, hauling him into his arms bridal-style. "Since you're too weary to get up and walk," he said, heading towards the still-broken used-to-be-automatic door that he had to push to the side to get through. "And since you sort of gave me permission for a second."

Bruce's ears were reddening; his cheeks, on the other hand, were still pale from his severe lack of sunlight. He wondered if he was heavy, but Clint seemed about as bothered about his burden as he was with the door. Which wasn't very much. He walked them into the elevator and pushed the ground floor button, ignoring the looks they were getting from the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents milling around the floor.

"I think I can walk now," Bruce said when they were almost to the bottom. "I have made a miraculous recovery and no longer require a walker or-- uh, other assistance." But Clint didn't let go of him, just held his comrade closer to his torso as the elevator doors swished open to the building's lobby. Instead of ignoring everyone else there he handed out friendly hellos and nods as he went on his way out the door, smirking when they'd vacated the premises. He set Bruce down to his feet when they'd gotten out onto the street. Nobody really noticed them, at least. They were too busy getting places and leaving them and hailing taxis.

"Somebody just watched that on the security cameras," Bruce was saying as they started walking in one direction, any direction. "What do you think the probability is that that ends up on the Internet?"

Clint just scoffed and set a faster pace. "S.HI.E.L.D.'s had to deal with more trouble than two old men," he assured Bruce. "They're probably busy with something a hell of a lot more important right now, like one of Reed Richards' experiments gone wrong again or some other arrow-shooting agent getting compromised by an alien god." He shrugged. "Nothing much. Today can be an off day. Mostly."

"What's the deal breaker?"

He considered. "Anything in our range that's too messy for, say, Spider-man to handle. Or the Fantastic Four. And aliens, if there are more than thirty-eight. What's your favorite place to eat around here?"

Bruce hadn't spent much time around here; he'd just been parasiting off of S.H.IE.L.D.'s cafeteria. "Indian food?" he offered, looking around, and Clint gestured at a place further down the street on the other side.

"Also, if the Indian food place gets compromised we get back on duty."

"Or if Fury calls."

Deciding his teammate was moving too sluggishly, Clint grabbed Bruce's hand and started pulling him through the crowd. "Too many conditions," he muttered. "Let's just go do something. Have you eaten yet?"

Bruce was blinking and looking around for a clock. "What time is it?"

"Let's just go to the Indian place," Clint said, sighing a little as he started smiling. They got across the street somehow (which was sort of a cross between playing Frogger and battling supervillains/taxi drivers, to be more descriptive) and stopped outside the entrance to the restaurant. Or, well, Bruce did. Clint just followed suit, giving his comrade a curious look.

"Tell me again what you're doing? Have you caught a scent?" Because Bruce was sort of just standing there and breathing in through his nose. "Can you smell drugs, big guy?" That got Clint a look that was probably a silent demand for the dog metaphors to stop, if the old man ones were going to continue.

"The air is fresh," Bruce said finally. He was still doing the thing.

Clint gave the air a dubious look. "The air is pollution and urbanization," he corrected, breathing in to affirm the fact for himself. Of course, he was right.

"It's better than being inside," Bruce clarified.

"Aside from the lack of air conditioning? I guess that sort of makes sense."

"There's life to it," he said simply before opening up the door (there were bells attached to the handle on the other side, announcing their arrival), and the way he said it was probably unsettling because his face looked like death. When he smiled slightly his lips looked more ghostly than alive.

Clint just kept moving.

They got a good seat near a window, but he had a feeling that was just because the waiter was feeling a little sorry for the scientist he was serving that kept staring wistfully out at the street. For a few seconds they didn't talk, just settled into the places and poses they'd be assuming for what'd probably be the next hour-- across from each other with the table between them, Bruce with the line of his shoulders angled towards the window and Clint lying back in his seat with the bottom of one boot up against a leg of his teammate's chair. The bow strapped to his back made things a bit more difficult, but he was used to it and more comfortable with it pressing into his back than the alternative.

"So you've never been here before?"

Bruce shook his head. "Not really." He was breathing in the air again through his nose, an odd expression on his face. But Clint could get that, because it did smell pretty lively in here. (He'd have to order whatever it was that the table behind them was having because it smelled _heavenly_.) He opted not to make another joke about Bruce the drug-sniffing dog, if only because his teammate looked too serious right now, like this was a thing that meant something other than just the general aroma of good food. He watched Bruce breathe and thought there was more color coming in to his face now. 

That was good to see, at least.

The waiter came back with glasses of water, passing out menus. Clint hadn't realized this place was so fancy (if having personal menus constituted as such, which he thought did). He reached down and felt the side of his right boot to make sure he had his wallet on him (which wasn't really a wallet so much as a S.H.I.E.L.D. credit card and a few twenties, crudely speaking). Bruce watched, his eyes seeming to register everything going on around and between them regardless of how red they looked around the edges.

"I haven't been a date in a while," he said suddenly, focusing enough on swirling the ice in glass with one finger that he didn't see much of Clint abruptly swallowing his own water. He did hear him coughing, though. He looked up, his face blank in a rather innocent way. "That's amusing," he commented quietly in regards to his teammate's expression. "Are you-- alright?" he added, because it looked like the answer was negative for a second before Clint's face smoothed over and he assumed his usual casual demeanor.

"Hm? Yep." Bruce was trying not to smile at him. "Is this what you'd call a date? I guess you have pretty low standards," Clint said. His voice sounded off. He withdrew his leg from the other man's general vicinity, trying to fix his posture without being too obvious about it.

Bruce tilted his head again. "Pretty much, I guess."

The waiter came by again; they ordered.

"Was that awkward?"

"Ordering? Uh, no?"

"The other thing." Bruce kicked at Clint's boot lightly with his shoe.

His teammate rolled his eyes. "Nah. You just surprised me, is all. I still have my sarcasm and wit about me. Just try me," he encouraged, crossing his arms in challenge.

He hadn't said it _wasn't_ a date.

"Have you ever been here?"

"Once or twice." Clint shrugged. "That wasn't a very good set-up, you know."

Bruce shook his head, cracking another smile. He looked a little less deathly with the sun shining through the window and marking up his features. "Be more imaginative, then."

“Not really my style. You know, you can sort of figure out other peoples’, though. Styles. Like, Tony has his narcissism. Logan has, um-- bestiality? No, maybe the word is animalism. And Wade just makes jokes about corpses and pop culture.”

“Where do you fit in?” his teammate asked.

Beat of silence. “I don’t know,” Clint answered, his eyebrows stitching together in thought above his narrowed eyes. “I guess I just go with it.” He glanced back up at Bruce and half-smiled. “You use satire.”

“Do I?”

“And you also have this somewhat _irritating habit_ of redirecting questions, I’ve noticed.” He watched Bruce lick his lips in silent response and adjust his glasses. “Among other irritating habits,” he added in a mumble, mostly to himself.

His comrade picked his head up and tilted it so that Clint was looking at his ear. “Sorry, old man hearing, remember?”

“Nothing important.”

“Is anything not?” Bruce cast him a philosophical look over his water glass.

“I don’t know that either.”

“You don’t know a lot of things, I’ve noticed.” He was stirring the ice again.

They kept bantering back and forth, trading the reins of the conversation between them until the conversation had evolved from shortly worded witticisms to paragraphs. Their positions about the table shifted, too-- Bruce with his elbows on the table on either side of his plate, turned fifteen degrees so that he was facing his teammate more than the street scene out the window, and Clint with his boot back on Bruce’s chair and his torso leaning across the table as he spoke to meet the other man halfway. They weren’t eating and talking between bites so much as talking and eating between sentences.

Clint gestured with his laden fork to emphasize words as he talked. “So I think it’s about time you admitted you’re glad I broke you out of your self-imposed prison,” he said. His face was inches from Bruce’s, which might have been more romantic if he hadn’t been talking with noodles in his mouth crowding up on his words. If it didn’t make Bruce blush, at least it made him laugh a little.

“I don’t know,” came the other man’s reply; he was mocking Clint when he leaned back in his chair to make a show of thinking it over. “There’s not much in terms of science in here, is there?” He seemed infinitely more cheerful than he had been before, still just as sharp but now with a smile, kind of.

Clint pushed his glass over to Bruce. “Science _this_.”

“That was quite the line,” his teammate murmured with another smile. But he was staring at the glass intently as if taking Clint’s proposition seriously. He reached into the pocket of his pants and came up with a small bottle of something Clint couldn’t recognize.

“What’s, um...”

Bruce let a drop of the liquid fall into the glass. “Party trick,” he offered with a shrug, and the water in the glass turned a bright shade of green, almost fizzing over the edges when it started bubbling.

“So it’s like bubbly food coloring,” Clint said after a moment.

“Look inside,” Bruce said, tilting the glass so the other man could see. “No ice.”

The archer stared for a moment, then snapped his jaw shut and grabbed the glass. It was _hot_. He snatched his hand back, staring at the fading mark on his palm after. “Well,” he said, trying to think of the literary equivalent to Bruce’s science. He had nothing. “That was intense.”

His teammate just laughed at him in his satirical, zombielike way. They kept talking as they finished eating, and then over dessert, and then the bill. Clint owned Bruce in talking about arrows and aerodynamics, Bruce turned the conversation over to physics, pulling the reins back to himself. Combat. Chemistry. Spy shit. More sciencey shit. And underneath it all the same growing red undertone, heating their words like Bruce’s thing with the glass. Their faces got closer until their noses were almost touching, which required a fair amount of leaning forward across the table, so they both sort of knew they’d given each other permission to cross whatever empty space was left entrapped between them. Clint started to move-- and then the bells on the door rang. Newcomer. He turned his head, not moving away from Bruce.

“Couldn’t you have just _called_?” he demanded of Agent Coulson, scowling. He had his hand still on Bruce's neck. The older man stopped at their table, tablet in hand, something sciencey on the screen of it.

“Well, since you were just down the street, I figured I’d get some air,” he answered, watching with some amusement as Bruce jumped back into his seat. “You’re needed, Agent Barton,” he said, addressing Clint.

His colleague didn’t look very much like he wanted to be needed. “What for?” When Coulson opened his mouth, Clint cut in before he could speak. “One word, not a thousand.” If it’d been Bruce, he would have gladly listened to him read a hundred-page dissertation. Unfortunately for him, Phil Coulson was not Bruce.

“Aliens, then?”

Clint and Bruce exchanged a glance, and the archer raised a finger in question. “How many, exactly?” he asked, referencing the deal breakers.

Coulson flipped through the file on his tablet. “It’s not a large invasion. Forty, perhaps?” He didn’t really understand why Clint was giving Bruce that look and mumbling curses under his breath except maybe because forty was worse than, say, thirty. He heard the number thirty-eight mentioned.

“Is this restaurant in danger?” The waiter was glancing over at them now.

“Um.” Coulson wasn’t quite sure how to answer. “I suppose that if you don’t help out it might be taken over by Skrulls who can’t cook Indian food,” he offered. He was usually very charismatic in this sort of situation, particularly when he could use threats, but here he was just sort of bewildered. It wasn’t helping much.

Thankfully, Clint got up from his seat, saying something again about deal breakers and apologizing to Bruce for having to leave. His date looked over at Coulson for a brief moment as if wondering if he ought to be helping out, too, but the S.H.IE.L.D. agent just shook his head in answer. The other guy wasn’t needed. (Not today, anyway.)

Coulson started back to the door, waiting for Clint while he held it open. His colleague was talking into Bruce’s ear, leaning in so that Coulson couldn’t hear.

“I’ll be back,” he mumbled into the other man’s ear, close so that Bruce could still hear him with his old man hearing and all. “Do me a favor and don’t go back to the lab yet, alright?”

“I’ll wait for you, then,” Bruce answered just as quietly, smirking over Clint’s shoulder. While he spoke he let his lips brush his teammate’s, contact so barely-there that it looked from the door like maybe it hadn’t even happened. But, of course, it had. “Good luck defending Manhattan and all of that, I guess. Don’t leave me hanging for Tony. I think that’s everything?”

Clint thought for a moment, then reached down into his boot and tossed his credit card onto the table. “It’s on S.H.I.E.L.D.,” he said with a shrug and another smile at Bruce.

Coulson didn’t entirely get why Clint was thanking him as they headed back to the building, but he thought he could figure out part of it.


End file.
